Paradise is Beneath the Shadow of Swords

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I begin to sing of Demeter, the holy goddess with the beautiful hair.

And her daughter [Persephone] too. The one with the delicate ankles, whom Hadês seized.

She was given away by Zeus, the loud-thunderer, the one who sees far and wide.

Demeter did not take part in this, she of the golden double-axe, she who glories in the harvest.

She [Persephone] was having a good time, along with the daughters of Okeanos, who wear their girdles slung low.

She was picking flowers: roses, crocus, and beautiful violets.

Up and down the soft meadow. Iris blossoms too she picked, and hyacinth.

And the narcissus, which was grown as a lure for the flower-faced girl by Gaia [Earth]. All according to the plans of Zeus. She [Gaia] was doing a favour for the one who receives many guests [Hadês].

It [the narcissus] was a wondrous thing in its splendor. To look at it gives a sense of holy awe to the immortal gods as well as mortal humans.

It has a hundred heads growing from the root up.

Its sweet fragrance spread over the wide skies up above.

And the earth below smiled back in all its radiance. So too the churning mass of the salty sea.

She [Persephone] was filled with a sense of wonder, and she reached out with both hands to take hold of the pretty plaything. And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her.

It happened on the Plain of Nysa. There it was that the Lord who receives many guests made his lunge.

He was riding on a chariot drawn by immortal horses. The son of Kronos. The one known by many names.

He seized her against her will, put her on his golden chariot, And drove away as she wept.

She cried with a piercing voice, calling upon her father [Zeus], the son of Kronos, the highest and the best.

But not one of the immortal ones, or of human mortals, heard her voice.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Being & Logos

Leithart
According to Gadamer (Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts), 405), philosophy essentially began with a nominalist move. The “earliest” view saw an “intimate unity of word and thing,” so intimate that the “true name was considered to be part of the bearer of the name.”

Philosophy “more or less began with the insight that the word is only a name – i.e., that it does not represent true being. This is precisely the breakthrough of philosophical inquiry into the territory over which the name had undisputed rule. Belief in the word and doubt about it constitute the problem that the Greek Enlightenment saw in the relationship between word and thing. Thereby the word changed from presenting the thing to substituting for it.”

This inevitably raised the question of whether language can be true at all, and the pressure of this question led Plato away from language to ideas as the locus of truth:

Having rejected the alternative accounts of language in the Cratylus, “Plato wants to demonstrate that no truth . . . can be attained in language – in language’s claim to correctness . . . – and that without words . . . being must be known purely from itself” (p. 407).

And this, Gadamer thinks, is the source of the problems of skepticism, objectivity, and truth in Western philosophy, problems that can only arise when one needs to compare what we say about a thing to what the thing is, a comparison only possible on the assumption that we have non-linguistic access to the thing to which we can compare our linguistic descriptions.

Philosophy begins not with forgetfulness of Being, but with forgetfulness of Logos, in the specific sense of language. Philosophy begins from forgetfulness of the truth that “in the beginning was the word.”

Is Leithart saying (here) that Plato was mistaken, & that his move was a nominalist, minimalist account of the power of Logos, moving away from seeing that the Word is identical to the Thing? If he is, my understanding of Plato is that this is overly simplistic to the point of error. Plato isn't saying that (for example) chanting the names of God or praying the prayer of the heart can't lead one to a realization of the divine shekinah. He is saying that one must first transcend one's own mentation and linguistics, prior to "seeing" God. This means that the "Logos" is not "wordy"or empirical. The Logos is the Divine Idea of God. Augustine canonizes this tradition, later on, and Plotinus explicates it in more nuance.

Who Pleases God?

Two men please God--who serves Him with all his heart because he knows Him; who seeks Him with all his heart because he knows Him not.
--Nikita Ivanovich Panin
Wikilink

Keats & Alchemy

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This is not surprising - I found this because I knew to look for it - Keats has always struck me as the "best" of the Romantics, someone who, had he lived, might have been a guiding spirit greater than Wordsworth. Unfortunately, he obtained his influence via the Freemasons, who had already begun to dabble in the darker currents. They had lost the integral medieval tradition that was dealt a death blow by Luther in his effort to Teutonize and stabilize and reform the corruptions of his own day. Like all revolutionary efforts (including our own Founding Fathers), an initial burst of energy and light and truth gave way to an even deeper despair, as another avenue was exhausted and proved a dead end. This can be likened to a subarachnoid hemorrhage, one of whose ominous signs in any patient is a sudden "improvement" & lucidity - the body has deployed all of its intercranial compensating measures and systemic countermeasures in a last ditch effort to lower intercranial pressure from the leaking vasculature. It is a bad sign. In & of itself, a good, but ominous for long term survival. The body's "ace" is a sign that it has its back to the wall. Likewise, many efforts today are doomed for the same reason - good in and of themselves, they nevertheless (if they do not work, and they usually do not, if the underlying problem goes untreated) ultimately place the patient in an even worse position, from which no recovery can be expected. It is telling that Keats died of love - his disease claimed two family members before him, both of whom he cared for. He was a better man than Byron, Shelley, or a host of other "poets". And a better poet. Had he lived (and he does live) he might have hymned a higher note.

In honor of Keats, may he rest in peace, one of the sainted dead, and one who found his way through Purgatory, safe to that far shore.

And Has He Died?

Came he among the whispering wood, or in the golden meads,

Still he holds the cypress crown, which gold Apollo gave.

Walked he in stormy wind about or in the laze of noon,

Yet still he sings the song around, eternal end too soon.

He rose above the blue sky wild and stopped beneath the sun,

The eagle grew his pinions strong yet earth does not outrun.

Others voyaged the ether out or wandered into space,

The psychonauts, dead stars about, are lost unto our race.

False gods may fly like crimson sparks thrown out of Eden’s heat,

Though one took wing, in faithful gyre, halfway the sun to meet.

He melted not, nor smitten blind, but sorrowed in his mind,

His weakened corse you cannot find, in England, green and kind.

In water writ, in Rome bestowed, a man between two worlds,

Forever twixt the sun and sky, his ruddy heart unfurled.

For us, he loved and lost his mind, for us did name our vale,

For us the mansions traced in fate, and young, faced Death’s black gale.

I prayed his soul last Good to find, to early love yet keep,

The answer came the Moon around “long yet so shall I sleep”.

“Until the fickle Fortune bows and Fame is quite forgot,

Until my unconsummate Love unto the Phoenix, wrought.”

“Each upward shines in golden Love who holds what they were gift,

And dances in God’s hearth, a Dove of flame to sing, to sift.”

“The change will come upon a day, the change I won in pain,

To come again a second Self, like sunshine in the rain.”

“But still the special color min that welled from in my heart,

Remains forever changeless dyed, as in that vase of art.”

“Unbroken yet and still and bright I yet remain as them,

Alone for ages in the rest, and dreaming on the wind.”

A Consideration of Christian Mysteries

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Link. This is a discussion of Phillip Sherrad, now deceased, an Eastern Orthodox writer and thinker. Chiefly interesting are the remarks on Guenon, worth quoting in full:

The late Philip Sherrard, a Perennialist and member of the Greek Orthodox Church, devotes a long chapter in his last book, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, to the “Logic of Metaphysics in René Guénon” – although the points he makes are just as applicable to Schuon, as we shall see. Guénon did more than anyone else to reawaken metaphysical perception in our century, Sherrard says. But he made two important assumptions that predisposed him against Christianity and towards Vedanta (and which help to explain his own conversion from Catholicism to Islam). The first of these assumptions was that a strict correlation must be preserved between the metaphysical and the logical order – thus ruling out in advance the more paradoxical Christian relationship between Unity and Trinity in the Godhead. The second assumption was that every “determination” of the Absolute must be some form of limitation, and is therefore incompatible with the divine nature. These two assumptions led Guénon into an apophaticism so radical that he could affirm nothing at all of the Absolute, except by way of negation – including, obviously, a negation of the Christian Trinity.

Before his death, then, Sherrard had come to the conclusion that a Christian thinker who accepts Revelation must start from an entirely different point of view – must begin, in fact, from the knowledge that the supreme Principle is the Trinity, and furthermore that “personality” (indeed, triple Personality) in God is not necessarily a limitation. Without it, in fact, the Absolute has no actual freedom to determine itself or create a world: the freedom of God becomes merely the absence of external constraint. Although Sherrard assumes Schuon’s “transcendental unity” approach throughout his book, this insight calls into question one of Schuon’s core teachings: that a personal (or Tri-Personal) deity derives from an impersonal Godhead and will be “dissolved” in the gnosis which transcends Being. (As Sherrard writes, “This view thus involves a total denial of the ultimate value and reality of the personal. It demands as a condition of metaphysical knowledge a total impersonalism – the annulment and alienation of the person.”)

Sherrard’s insight leaves the other religions intact. It even leaves open the possibility that the perennialists have correctly understood them. But it separates Christianity, and perhaps even raises Christianity above them, in a way that seems to me incompatible (more so than he himself realized) with the theory of “transcendental unity” as stated by Schuon. Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, for one, believes that what Christians have to say is not something less than, say, Vedanta or Sufism, but more. In fact “the Christian is called to be the guardian of metaphysics for our time”. Of one exemplary Christian mystic he writes: “Looking into his own ground, Jan van Ruysbroeck sees beyond it into the eternal I, which for man is both the source of his own I as well as his eternal Thou, and in the final analysis this is because the eternal I is already in itself I and Thou in the unity of the Holy Spirit” [Glory of the Lord, V, p. 70]. The encounter with God in this “ground” is a nuptial encounter, a spiritual marriage. Thus “The pantheistic tat tvam asi, which identifies subject and object in their depths, can be resolved only by virtue of the unity between God and man in the Son, who is both the ars divina mundi and the quintessence of actual creation (see Book III of Nicolas of Cusa’s Doctor Ignorantia), and by virtue of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from this incarnate Son in his unity with the Father” [GL, I, 195].

Please refer to Tomberg's remarks on the "sheep" of the personality & the "Self beyond the Self" in Meditations!

Christianity is called upon to rise to this challenge - to transcend its own doctrines, & thus, to come into its very own.

The Wisdom of God

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Sighs of the Saints, the Cries of the Fay

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I am the twilight – the widow – the unconsoled,
Nobility in whose towers the weeds now bloom;

My only star dead and all the strings sold
From my lute inscribed with the dark sun’s Gloom.

You who consoled me in the graveyard night,
Give me Pausillippo, Italy’s seas,
The flower to be my sad heart’s delight,
And the trellis whose vines the roses seize.

Apollo or Eros? … Arthur or Henry?
Still I blush from the kiss of the queen;
I have dreamt in the grotto where sirens are seen…

And I have crossed Hell twice to victory:
As Orpheus playing, now loud now faint,
The cries of the fairy, the sighs of the saint.

Translated by James Harriman-Smith

The Black Stage of Alchemy:

"After this terrible experience, Dante recovers a little, but realises that he cannot proceed alone: he is prevented from doing so by the three beasts that represent the three poisons of the ego (lust, pride, greed). Only with the help of a Master can he go on, and in fact the meeting with Virgil takes place (when the disciple is ready, the Master arrives). With Virgil’s guidance, Dante enters the Inferno, in other words, he begins his journey to the centre of the Earth, experiencing what the alchemists called VITRIOLVM (visit the inside of the Earth, by rectifying you will find the hidden stone, true medicine) [a Latin acronym – Tr.].This is the hermetic black phase, a dangerous operation whereby the structure of the individual, the personality, must dissolve, the soul-essence must cut loose from the individual body, tied to time and space (the world). In order for this work to succeed, it must be undertaken with a pure heart, with the right intention and accompanied by a guide.In this phase of the work on himself, the searcher must face up to his own shadows, his inner demons, the infernal side of his passions. The historical characters that Dante meets during his descent through the infernal rings symbolically represent these aspects. The damned are completely absorbed in the dimension of their own sin, blocked in that one single sentiment and psychological disposition, in an endless repetition of that same situation."

Saint Alban, protector the Islands of the West, pray for me. May I cross the river of Hell, twice, & with the aid and comfort of the angel.

The Rta, the Logos, the Moira - the Orders of Creation, will triumph over Darkness, within, without. Christ will come again.